ABSTRACT ? BIOMEDICAL INFORMATICS AND CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE ENHANCEMENT The key elements of a successful program in clinical and translational research include web-based communication and coordination, research data accumulation and management, secure and privacy-sensitive storage with indexed retrieval, robust computational and analytical tools, expert bioinformatics and computational consultants and collaborators, access to statewide electronic medical and health records, along with rapid and effective dissemination of information. These form the basis of our vision for a proposed Center for Biomedical Informatics that would be critical for the effective operation of the proposed Rhode Island Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences (RI-CCTS). The proposed Center for Biomedical Informatics will provide leadership, organization and integration of biomedical informatics expertise within the participating institutions and create critically important structural and functional biomedical informatic linkages between clinical and basic science investigators. The Center will provide instruction on the implementation and application of new contemporary resources and tools for carrying out population based epidemiological studies, generating clinical surveys and mining new patient databases. It will support research strategies that require the use of ?big data? approaches to integrate output from new ?omics? platforms with the distinctive patient cohorts in our affiliated hospital network. Our goal is to enable the broad application of high performance computing and cyberinfrastructure in the most effective utilization of our unique population based resources with the aim of benefitting our local population and addressing issues of health disparity in Rhode Island and other IDeA jurisdictions. This multi-institutional Center will create and support professional development opportunities for investigators from wide-ranging disciplines to learn about biomedical informatics. It will facilitate investigators learning about and establishing collaborations with colleagues at their own or different institutions, allowing them to explore new and more powerful computational approaches to clinical and translational research. The Center for Biomedical Informatics will also enable broad access to the large clinical and translational research networks supported through the IDeA-CTR consortium. Lastly, the Center will harness contemporary, computerized resources to track and evaluate the use of limited valuable resources across the RI-CCTS network. To achieve these goals, the Specific Aims are: 1) Create a sustainable, team-based, multidisciplinary Center for Biomedical Informatics to provide the cyberinfrastructure needed to enable effective collaborative clinical and translational research while leveraging all available existing electronic resources. 2) Promote and advance professional development in biomedical informatics through workshops and other activities that will also serve to enhance collaborative interactions within Rhode Island and across the IDeA network. 3) Use contemporary, web-based tools to track and evaluate the use of resources across the RI-CCTS network.